Engineers found damage on Atlantis’ right wing during a scan of the space shuttle’s heat shield Tuesday, but late in the day they determined it did not pose a threat to the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission.

At 106 seconds into launch, a camera aboard the shuttle captured pieces of debris striking the forward edge of the wing, and sensors in the wing also measured this impact.

However, mission managers say the preliminary estimate of the damage — a series of dings that spans 21 inches across four protective tiles — does not appear to be significant.

“This is not something we’re very concerned about,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the management team overseeing the Atlantis mission.

By Tuesday evening, an astronaut in mission control, Alan Poindexter, radioed Atlantis to tell them the wing damage did not require further investigation.

The damage was found during a routine scan conducted on the second day of Atlantis’ flight during which astronauts guided a camera attached to a robotic arm around the exterior of the vehicle.

Cain said NASA’s imagery experts do not believe the dings in the shuttle tiles are deep, nor are they in an area of the spacecraft where heating is greatest during the vehicle’s fiery return home through Earth’s atmosphere.

Had the damage been more significant than the preliminary estimates, astronauts could have used a special putty to repair the tiles during a spacewalk.

Or, in a worst-case scenario, NASA has a second shuttle, Endeavour, on standby to launch if Atlantis’ crew needs rescuing.

Atlantis blasted into space Monday for an 11-day mission to repair and upgrade the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Today the shuttle will fly up to Hubble’s altitude of 350 miles to rendezvous with the 19-year-old telescope.

Astronaut Megan McArthur will use the shuttle’s robot arm to grasp the school bus-sized telescope around midday and place it in the shuttle’s payload bay. Starting Thursday, astronauts will embark on the first of five spacewalks in five days to make repairs and modifications to the Hubble.